The present invention relates to automatic fare collection equipment for mass transit systems, and more particularly to an improved ticket transport for processing tickets in such a system.
Mass transit systems now use tickets that are coded for fare collection for a number of trips. Thus, multiple fare payments for rides on trains, subways, buses and the like may be handled by the purchase of one ticket from a vending machine. This avoids the necessity of individual money and coin transactions with each ride, greatly reduces the number of clerks and other personnel required, reduces robbery problems, and eases time delays in moving passengers onto and off of the conveyances.
Such systems, however, require that tickets be processed and reprocessed for individual fare determination and collection from the composite amount of fair paid on each ticket. This requires ticket handling mechanisms that vend tickets, receive tickets, process tickets for admittance to one or more fares, deduct fares from tickets, and return tickets to the user.
The handling of such tickets and the processing of the information thereon, which may be magnetically encoded in binary form, requires a ticket transport that is capable of quickly and efficiently handling a large number of tickets. This requires the capability for receiving tickets from the ticket holder at skewed angles, and moving the tickets in an efficient and aligned manner across magnetic read/write heads, without jamming or creating other problems. One such ticket transport is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,181,920 of Cerekas assigned to the assignee of the present application. In that transport, tickets are sandwiched between pairs of movable belts that are pinched together for exact positioning at the point of contact with magnetic heads.
An analysis of the functions required to be performed by automatic fare collection equipment in mass transit systems indicates that modularized components may be utilized to perform the same functions in different pieces of equipment. It would be desirable to provide a ticket transport which could be utilized to perform read, write, and/or verify functions as a component of a ticket office vending machine, a passenger operated ticket vending machine, a passenger access gate or a passenger exit gate. Such a ticket transport would have to be adapted to be mechanically and electronically interfaced with other modules or components dedicated to performing other processing functions.